Fray Luis de León, Góngora, and Manrique: Spanish Literature
Fray Luis de León: Salamanca Professor
Fray Luis de León, a professor at the University of Salamanca, was imprisoned for translating the Song of Songs into the vernacular and commenting on the Vulgate.
Works:
Most of his work consists of odes, compositions of varied matter, and short stanzas of indefinite verse.
Metrics:
He mainly used the lira, but also 4, 6, and 7 stanzas of verse.
Topics:
Mixed.
Style:
Forging a new language, learned and reinforced.
Beatus Ille:
The collection of poems by Fray Luis de León opens with an imitation of one of Horace’s most celebrated odes, Beatus Ille, where the poet praises the retired life of a citizen who took refuge in cottages, fleeing the hectic city life.
Odes:
The most interesting group of odes is that of the Salmantinos. The Ode leads his friends to Francisco de Salinas (connecting the harmony of music with the spiritual). The Ode to Loarte constitutes a song to universal harmony.
Cantar Mio Cid
Cantar Mio Cid recounts the exploits of Rodrigo Diaz, a real person. The poem consists of 3700 verses grouped into verses called monorrimos runs. The lines are irregular in terms of syllables and are not divided into two hemistiches by a pause. The poems rhyme with assonance.
Style and Language:
Towards verisimilitude features: the text represents an abundant credible story without fantastic elements, while the hero’s qualities are exaggerated, but it is a fixed formula to be humane. He employs his own epics in which he stresses the epics epithets to identify characters by quality.
Luis de Góngora: Folk and Learned Poetry
Luis de Góngora’s work consists of folk poetry and learned poems.
Style:
Góngora’s new style of concentration is based on stylistic procedures and is a poetic revolutionary, elitist, and removed from the vulgo. The new forms spread and led to a new poetica stream: gongorismo.
Polyphemus and Galatea:
This is a mythological poem composed based on 63 eighths reales. It uses metamorphosis.
Summary:
Polyphemus, a cyclops, is attracted by the nymph Galatea. One summer afternoon, he falls in love with the nymph and Acis. The cyclops discovers them and throws a rock at Acis, crushing him. Acis’s blood turns into flowing water until the sea, leaving the Acis river. There are mythological allusions and convoluted language.
The Solitudes:
The initial project consisted of 4 poems, but he only wrote two, with the second unfinished.
Soledad Primera (First Solitude):
A spring and a beautiful young sailor finds a beach where there is a dark cliff. He makes it to the top and, after passing through a forest, comes home to a few herdsmen they visit.
Soledad Segunda (Second Solitude):
The pilgrim meets some fishermen. From a palace, unexpected hunters appear, and the poem breaks out.
Romances and Letrillas:
In romances, he is sometimes burlesque and other times serious.
Jorge Manrique: Knight and Poet
Jorge Manrique, born in Castilian Palencia, was a knight. He was a prototype dedicated to letters and the militia. He belonged to the side of Isabel the Catholic in the succession struggle and died for this cause.
Author:
He wrote some compositions of the love affair and owes his fame to a single work written in couplets on the death of his father, Don Rodrigo Manrique.
Aspects:
In the language as in the metric, he chose simplicity. It is predominantly composed of 40 stanzas couplets called broken foot.
Starters:
PIEX were comical characters that are represented in works of entreteatros greater duracion. Cervantes wrote 8 starters in prose and verso. In them attend the themes and types of hors d’oeuvre before but giving more depth based on multiple meaning embodied in their works.